


all these things that I have done

by AtlantisRises



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: A study in good people making bad choices, Background Barry/Lup - Freeform, Found Family, Gen, I love Lucretia so much, Oops, Spoilers for episode 66, lost family, probably one-sided Lucretia/Lup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 04:23:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11372502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlantisRises/pseuds/AtlantisRises
Summary: "Back soon," the note had said, back soon and yet it’s been months and Lup isn’t back, and Lucretia isn’t sleeping anymore, and the whole ship feels cold, cold, cold.***Lucretia makes a choice.MAJOR SPOILERS FOR EPISODE 66





	all these things that I have done

Lucretia watches Lup leave them.

It isn’t an all-at-once thing—it happens by degrees, like a fire burning out slow. What’s left is hard and brittle and cracking, slowly but surely. Lucretia starts to find her pacing the Starblaster, eyes empty, holding a whisk or a wand or a potted plant like she’s forgotten what she meant to be doing. She talks less. She laughs almost never, and when she does there’s always a hysterical edge to it.

It ties Lucretia’s chest up in knots to see it, but she was never built for comforting others and the Gauntlet situation is so far beyond her that she wouldn’t know where to start. She understands the guilt, is the thing, understands how it must gnaw at Lup, who once stood in front of a thousand displaced souls and said “ _we will not be the ones to destroy them”._ What can Lucretia say now, in the face of tens of thousands of dead?

( _How could we do this,_ she doesn’t say. _How could we become this?_ She can’t. She loves Lup too much.)

She tries putting her hand on Lup’s shoulder instead, one night after dinner when it’s just the two of them left at the table. The old Lup would have leaned into the gesture, maybe with the sort of flirty smirk that always set Lucretia’s heart beating inappropriately fast. This Lup just sags under it, and her ears droop, and the way she smiles at Lucretia looks more like an apology than anything else.

She locks herself up in her room the next day, and doesn’t let anyone but Taako in. Lucretia lingers in the hall outside, trying not to eavesdrop, and hears that sharp hysterical laugh ring out and then dissolve into tears. The day after that Lup is gone, and there’s a two-word note on the table. Cold seeps up from somewhere under Lucretia’s ribs and doesn’t leave.

***

The others are on edge even before the note, Barry especially. There’s something angry in him, and something guilty; he snaps more than he ever used to, at everyone but especially at Taako and Merle, and then usually he retreats into himself and comes back an hour later with a hand-wringing apology.

Lucretia watches this happen, one time and two times and three, and tries to understand, and tries to push away the little voice in her head that says that Barry doesn’t deserve this sort of anger, _not when this was all his idea._

( _It was Lup’s idea too_ , she tells the voice, and anyway Barry’s anger falls to pieces after Lup leaves, becomes a desperate obsession that keeps him locked in his study at all hours.)

*

Taako keeps joking and keeps laughing and keeps cooking, but Lucretia watches as under it all he gets colder and colder and harder and harder until there’s something spiny about him that only ever softens when the seven of them are alone on the Starblaster.

Lucretia walks with him through a small-town market one day, after the Relics but before the note, and can’t help staring at his ears, the way they draw up and back as he moves. She stares at the razor edge of his smile as he flirts and haggles and cajoles the price of several loaves of bread down to half of what the elderly shopkeeper had asked for them. Lucretia stares and stares and stares until he feels her staring and turns to look, and for half a second he looks hard and sharp and fake and she remembers him shrugging and saying, “I just threw the Stone down some well. It isn’t my fucking problem anymore _._ ”

( _He doesn’t care about these people at all_ , Barry says. Lup knows he does, but she thinks maybe he’s trying not to.)

*

Magnus takes much greater care in placing his Relic, and he returns to them sunburned and quiet, with his hood pulled up and a tremor in his hands. He laughs at Taako’s horrible dirty jokes during dinner that night, but when the conversation moves on Lucretia looks back at him and sees him touching the burn on his face, touching his neck, touching his lips. He stops and looks at his big hands and wraps them tight around the water glass in front of him with a crease between his eyebrows that looks almost like confusion and almost like fear.

( _It couldn’t be_ , Lucretia tells herself late that night, when she can’t sleep. _We’re safe here. If nothing else, we’re safe._ )

*

Merle and Davenport continue on, as steady as they’ve ever been, but Lucretia can see the way they watch the wars unfolding beneath them. There’s a heavy look on Davenport’s face after every new disaster, a subtle tightening of his jaw and widening of his eyes. “My fault," she catches him muttering to Merle one night, eyes on his cards and shoulders hunched. “Two hundred people. My fault.”

( _Our fault,_ Lucretia doesn’t say as she sits down at the far end of the table with her journals, pretending not to hear. _All of our fault, and I didn’t want to do it._ )

***

All of this, and then Lup is gone. Barry gets desperate, and Taako looks lost and betrayed and hard and sharp and Lucretia can feel her family tugging itself apart from the inside. _Back soon,_ the note had said, back soon and yet it’s been months and Lup isn’t back, and Lucretia isn’t sleeping anymore, and the whole ship feels cold, cold, cold.

They aren’t safe after all. They tore the Light of Creation in seven and they set a world on fire and they still aren’t safe and it’s their fault, _her fault_ for letting any of this happen. There has to be something she can do to make it right. There has to be _something_. She has to do something.

She hides herself away in her room, across the hall from where Barry and Taako are huddled together in the study, and she twirls a pen between her fingers and paces and paces and paces and then she looks up. Fisher is there, in his tank, where he’s been since that one awful year where he was all that she had left. There’s a cabinet beside his tank that contains every single written record of their ninety-nine year journey.

 _No._ She can’t do that. She looks down at herself, at her hands, at the scar gouged out of her left thigh when the Starblaster was shot down. She can’t do it. She can’t be alone again.  

 _Back soon_ , the note had said, and Lucretia is so cold, but this is her family. This is everything she has left.

She can’t do it. 

( _You have to,_  she says to herself.)

(" _I'm sorry_ ," she says to Magnus.  _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry._ )

**Author's Note:**

> Listen. Listen. I love Lucretia with all my heart and soul and she did what she thought she had to do.
> 
> Also: Justin Mcelroy, how dare you. _"WHO?"_ how daARe you.
> 
> Title from The Killers' "All These Things Ttat I've Done"
> 
> Comments are <3


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